Environmental Engineering Reference
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2
“THE BARBARIANS ARE
AT THE DOOR”
I'd been watching Warren Taylor and Bill Dix have at it for nearly an
hour when the rain started to come down. But that didn't stop either
of them. Dix, in his sixties with a tanned face weathered by decades on
the land, wore dirty jeans, a Red Bull t-shirt, and a muddy green cap
over his balding hair. He sipped on a grapefruit soda and spit chew as
we talked. Or, more precisely, as I listened. Dix was on a roll, and when
that happened, you didn't get in his way.
Twenty years had passed since Bill Dix and his wife, Stacy, started
raising Jersey heifers to make milk on this patch of southern Ohio land.
Recently, though, the sleepy community had woken up. h e rumors
started in earnest the past autumn when landmen from out of state
swooped into Athens County and started of ering cash in exchange
for the right to drill for oil and gas. A few years earlier, another natu-
ral gas rush had grazed this patch of southern Ohio. In neighboring
Pennsylvania, drillers had tapped into the Marcellus shale, bring-
ing forth billions of cubic feet of fuel. A few unsuccessful wells were
drilled on the Ohio side of the border too. Just north of town, beside
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